


boys wear overcoats in the heat like this to keep themselves from showing

by cashtastrophe



Category: X-Men - All Media Types, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: AU, Charles-centric, Depression, Internalized Homophobia, Kink Meme, M/M, Self Confidence Issues
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-17
Updated: 2014-11-09
Packaged: 2018-02-09 05:11:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1970217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cashtastrophe/pseuds/cashtastrophe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What did you do, Mummy said and How did you do that, Dad said, and Charles can't answer any of it, because he doesn't know. Mummy cries and Dad shouts and Charles, he understands.</p><p> </p><p>No one wants a freak for a son.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> just resurrecting a scribble I liked from way back when--gonna pick this baby up again

When Charles is eight years old, his power manifests itself in the worst way possible.

 

He's eight years old, though, and he doesn't know words like 'manifest,' but he knows it hurts like nothing else and he knows it's so terribly loud all the time and he knows something is horribly wrong when his pretty, sweet teacher crumples to the ground in front of the chalkboard and the other Year Fours are crying but it's nowhere near as loud as it is inside his head.

 

('Projecting,' he'll learn later, and immediately set about stopping himself doing it. It takes two uncomfortable weeks, two weeks of shutting off and shutting down before it becomes habit. It aches sometimes, all those thoughts pressed into the back of his skull, both his and borrowed. His head feels too full, but no one crumples around him anymore, no one weeps involuntarily. It's worth it.)

 

What did you do, Mummy said and How did you do that, Dad said, and Charles can't answer any of it, because he doesn't know. Mummy cries and Dad shouts and Charles, he understands.

 

No one wants a freak for a son.

 

Miss Temple doesn't come back to class for a month. They have Miss Rath instead, a dour, cruel lump of a woman and it's barely a week before Charles makes her collapse, too.

 

He didn't mean to, he really didn't, it's just that she makes him so nervous. He knows the answer to every question she asks, but when those cruel grey eyes fix on him, his throat closes up and the words crumble to dust on his tongue. And she sneers at him and mocks him and calls him stupid so he wishes she would just stop and then she does.

 

Charles is sent off to boarding school after that. It's a cold, frightening place where the motto may as well be _grit your teeth and bear it_ because the masters are cruel and the other boys crueler, and Charles is a small, delicate little thing. He smiles his brightest and he thinks as quietly as he can, but he doesn't make friends easily. He never has.

 

The most important lesson he learns is _hide._

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

 

It isn't until later--years later, much later, past the awkward adolescent years--that he learns to control it. Oh he tries, certainly, but it's tenuous and stretched, too much like walking a half-mad tiger on a thin leash. It snaps sometimes (too often) and he wonders, guiltily, if he means to do it. Because he doesn't want to hurt anyone but sometimes--

 

God, sometimes he's just so very _alone._

 

('Puberty,' he'll explain later to a sleepy-eyed scientist with a shy smile and opposable toes, 'is the bane of the untrained mutant.')

 

And sometimes it's that he really, honestly doesn't notice what he's doing. He's so used to the ache of it, the hurt, the constant press of it that it doesn't register until the boy slumped over in the chair next to him begins to weep silently. It's unnerving, watching that, watching the way he can make someone feel without even trying. 

 

It's hateful, that stark reflection of the inside of his head. God, is that what he feels like all the time? Is that how it would feel if he wasn't so resigned to it, so numbed?

 

'I'm sorry,' Charles mumbles to the boy--a skinny, redheaded thing tilted precariously on that blurred line between 'boy' and 'man,' with bright, curious eyes--and the boy blinks the tears away. He touches his face, looking puzzled and _why am I crying?_ and _why is he apologizing?_ flick through Charles' skull, whisperquick. 

 

'It's okay,' the boy--Michael, Charles thinks--says. Charles clamps down hard on his own thoughts, pulls and wrenches them back into himself so that it really is. Michael smiles at him, then, scrubs at his face with the back of his hand.

 

No one's ever smiled at Charles like that before.

 

It takes him a second to puzzle through what he's supposed to do with his face-- _smile back, what's wrong with you, smile bac_ k--but by the time he's managed it, Michael's turned back towards the front of the room. And Charles missed his chance. If he'd just been quicker, if he'd done something normal instead of just staring blankly, like an idiot, like a _freak—_

 

It's okay, though, because a week later, Charles gets another chance. Michael crowds him against their dorm wall with no fanfare, no explanation, just an odd heat in his eyes and an unsure quirk to his mouth, and kisses Charles, hard. It's messy, it's wet, Michael bites too hard, but Charles had no idea how much his skin ached for touch. How would he? He's never missed it because he's never had it. He's never been kissed before this. He's never held hands before. He's certainly never been pushed urgently to his knees, had desperate, clinging fingers curl into his hair as he--

 

And Charles doesn't thinks it's him, doesn't think he would--could--force this (but he'll always wonder, won't he, if Michael wanted it more than he did, or if he wanted it more than Michael).

 

Michael's kind about it, friendlier after that, but they're not--well, they're not even really acquaintances, so they certainly can't be anything more. But Michael smiles at him in the hallway, crooked and understanding, so even though it never happens again, Charles is kind of glad it was his first.

 

His only, Charles thinks for a long time, because of course the strangeness couldn't stop at the way he bleeds into other people's minds, lets them bleed into his. Of course he couldn't just want women, of course, of course it would have to be more complicated. And he's too soft as it is. There doesn't need to be truth to the slurs and the hisses of faggot that follows him down the hall.

 

Charles is nothing, if not adaptable.

 

*

 

 

Sometimes…it’s hard to separate. There’s a difference, of course there is, between his thoughts and the borrowed ones. The problem is that it takes him years to learn to distinguish between the two. And the bitter, dull tang of his own self-loathing is so like the casual flicks of freak and god, he’s such a ponce, such a little bitch, how can he smile like that all the time, he’s got to know we can’t stand him that, well. He’s not quite sure if it’s theirs or his sometimes.

 

He’s fourteen before he really connects that it’s probably not normal to think in the third person. Was there a point where he started thinking _he_ instead of _I_? Because it’s all just a rambling thrum of narration, thoughts and memories and little snatches of things that might be memories or his memories of those memories. He can’t be sure what’s him, half the time.

 

Charles gets jumped outside his dorms once—more than, of course, but this one sticks out—and it’s the first time he fights back, really. Thrashes and kicks and bites because he’s little and pretty so he fights dirty as he can. There’s a boy named Brent whose father beat him every day of his life kicking him in the gut over and over until he vomits. Matthew, who has Charles’ arms wrenched behind his back had a priest who touched him in ways he didn’t understand liking, and he’s pulling so hard that Charles’ shoulders scream.

 

It hurts of course. He can’t see out of his left eye for three days straight and he can’t sleep on his back, but there’s the deep calm of their exorcism, too. He doesn’t know how to separate the two, so they snarl together behind his eyes and even when he’s old enough to understand it, they never quite come untangled. The bite of pain sings bright against his nerve endings and even if he hates it, it’s the closest thing he has to worship.

 

*

 

It's not always miserable for Charles, despite everything University is a blessing, especially after the horror show of secondary school and sixth form, because for the first time he realizes there actually are other people like him. Not freaks, no, not people who overflow into the heads of those around them, but people who really, genuinely enjoy learning.

 

It's not something to be shoved and spit at over anymore. It's not showing off, or being wrong again, somehow. University is more cerebral--sure, there are still the rough-and-tumble rugby players who go out of their way to trip him in the halls, but now it seems juvenile. Childish. Charles isn't the freak quite as much as he was--now he's a quiet, somewhat shy boy trying to make his way though his classes, just like everyone else.

 

Well. Not like everyone else, necessarily, because he figures out very quickly that university is easy. School always has been, for him, but he refuses to feel like an outsider again just because he enjoys lectures and musty old science journals. It's a blessing, actually, the way he learns things the first time he reads them and never forgets, the way he doesn't have to pore over his notes for hours and hours before exams.

 

Which he does anyways, because he has a study group now, and it's the first time he's had people willingly spend an extended period of time in his company. It's not friends, okay, he knows that. He's not stupid.

 

But...it's nice. It's somewhat approaching normal. And okay, it takes him a little while to figure out that no, they don't actually want the answers to every question they ask. That's the point of a study group, he guesses, and after the sharp, sneering stares he gets the first week, Charles learns to keep his mouth shut.

 

They don't like him after that, but they don't hate him either. They ignore him, mostly, but they don't tell him to leave. Charles kind of figures that's as close as he's going to get.

 

Coincidentally, university is also where he discovers alcohol. And he's not sure what he likes more--the hours spent in the library with people who can actually think on his level, or the bourbon he's taken to downing with breakfast.

 

But he's not foolish enough to believe that the two are mutually exclusive.

 

 

*

 

The smiling girl is the one who finds him, in the end. They're at a party, one of those accidental dormitory affairs that everyone just kind of winds up at, without knowing quite how they've gotten there. Charles has downed five pints and a few spectacularly awful mixed drinks by this point, and he's melted into the couch, slumped over and half-asleep and almost happy.

 

She sits down next to him, too close, her thigh bare and warm against the wool of his trousers. She's pretty, he thinks muzzily, in such a California way--none of that anaemic English pallor, just gold skin and white teeth and hair the colour of corn silk.

 

He realizes, abruptly, that it's the texture of corn silk, too. Which he knows, because he's touching it.

 

'Sorry, so sorry,' he murmurs, snatching his hand back. He's not that drunk, he's never that drunk. What the hell is he _doing_? Smiling doesn't mean she's okay with touching him, doesn't mean she wants him touching _her_ and what if she thinks he's trying to pick her up, Christ, he can't exactly come out with _thanks but no thanks, honey, afraid I'm queer as a nine-bob note, but could you keep that to yourself, please, I don't much fancy getting my head smashed in--_

 

She touches her forehead, grimacing and something in his chest twists. He's drunk. He's drunk and he's _doing it again, stupid, stupid, why can't he control it, why can't he, he should have stayed home should have--_

 

'Fuck,' she hisses, wincing now. 'Could you just--you're so loud, can you just not do that for a minute?'

 

Sick, he squeezes his eyes shut and wrenches at his own mind, curls it small and scared into itself, crushes it down, down, down.

 

California's clutching at her chest now, right where her heart would be. She doesn't look any more comfortable. She stares down at it, where he hand's pressed hard against the swell of her breasts, and when she looks back up at him, she's grinning.

 

'Christ,' she says, and it sounds almost admiring. 'You are a _mess_.' And then she bares her teeth in a smile that's not as pretty as it is dangerous and it must be Charles' imagination, because her eyes look yellow. 

 

She touches his arm. He flinches away, violently. The smile eases into something she might give to a very small child, or a frightened puppy and he can hear _oh, you poor thing_ somewhere in the back of his skull. 'Erik's gonna _love_ you.’

 

*

 

Erik, despite the girl's prediction--Raven's, Charles corrects, and such a bitter, black name for such a bright young thing--does not love him.

 

In fact, Erik barely looks at him. He tosses a brief, calculating look over the top of his newspaper, appraising, like he's the sort of man who can't look at anything without considering its worth. Charles gets the brief impression of cold eyes, razor cheekbones and--nothing. It's like standing across from a metal box, dull and smooth and perfectly impenetrable. Charles can't feel a thing from him, can't hear, it's like being deaf and blind. 

 

God, it's calming.

 

Erik snaps the newspaper up again and he's gone. 'I thought we talked about bringing home strays, Raven,' is all he says, in a calm, perfectly clipped American accent and Charles hadn't realized 'til now that he'd been expecting something much more Germanic and harsh

 

'He's a telepath,' Raven says, and crosses the room to flop onto the couch next to Erik. She wriggles into the cushions and pillows her head on Erik's thigh, tossing Charles a sweet little half-smirk. She has to push Erik's newspaper aside to do so, and he glances down at her with one eyebrow raised, looking annoyed and resigned all at once.

 

_Lovers,_ Charles, thinks, and then no, that's not right. Siblings? But that isn't it either, doesn't quite explain the messy, sprawling way Erik lets her push into his personal space when he keeps himself perfectly contained and sitting ramrod-straight. There's an almost military precision to it and really, who reads the newspaper like their spine might snap if they dare to relax it?

 

He is possibly still drunk.

 

'A telepath?' Erik glances up at him one more time and Charles knows how he must look--red-eyed and bleary, hair mussed, shirt untucked, reeking of alcohol. Young and sloppy, and so entirely unlike the man on the couch, with his crisply-pressed trousers and fitted turtleneck and stupid, stupid cheekbones. He could be a model, if only he'd stop scowling for a second.

 

Charles grits his teeth and clamps down firmly on that train of thought, thank you very much. But then Erik smiles, this sharp, cutting thing with too many bright shark-teeth, wicked as the business side of a blade. Charles closes his eyes and hopes it looks like he's just trying to keep himself from being sick all over the plush hotel carpet.

 

He sort of is. _Faggot_ , he snarls at himself, furious and then _freak_ and it helps, the rhythm of those two cracked, familiar words. It calms him down like it always does, settles the old, familiar pain in the pit of his stomach and it's like a security blanket, warm and smothering.

 

'Shaw has a telepath,' Erik rumbles and Raven laughs.

 

'That was the idea behind this, yeah. He's--fuck, Erik, he's _strong_. I mean, he's kind of drunk right now, but what he did...' Charles opens his eyes to see her making some wiggly gesture in the air with her manicured nails. He has no idea what she's trying to convey or who Shaw is or how she knows he's a telepath (because he did research, okay, and _freak_ 's not the technical word for it) but Erik tilts his head, considering.

 

'Can you show me?' And no, no Charles can't, because the thought of using it, the thought of trying to do it makes him abruptly nauseous, makes a cold clench of terror seize around something in his chest and if he wasn't so unsteady on his feet, he'd run, run out the door and down the hall and through the lobby and away, run until he collapsed.

 

All he wants, all he's ever wanted is for it to stop.

 

'I _can't,_ ' is all he chokes out, a small, strangled thing. The near-pleased expression on Erik's face vanishes, replaced with something much more familiar--disappointment.

 

'Then I can't see him having much use, Raven,' Erik says, and picks up his newspaper again. Dismissed, just like that, and this was a waste of time. Charles has told her it would be, but she'd smiled at him and said _different_ like it meant special and God, Charles was stupid.

 

'You can't feel that?' Raven glances up at Erik, rolls her eyes. 'Of course you can't. You're a robot. God forbid something as plebeian as feelings touch you. ' Some complex, near-impossible twist of her body has her springing up off the couch and padding towards him, steps soft in her stocking feet. 'He's probably never even been trained. I bet this is natural.  Have you?' she asks Charles, not unkindly.

 

'I have,' his traitorous mouth says, and yes, he kind of has, hasn't he? What else could the last decade have been, if it wasn't training, wasn't learning to crush his aberration down somewhere dark and secret where he didn't have to feel it all the time? It was rigorous, constant, exhausting. A fight, every day, from morning 'til night and often in the nightmare hours between.

 

'Have you?' She looks--is--surprised. 'But you said--'

 

'I didn't say it worked,' he admits. _But I've been trying, I've been trying so hard to make it stop, to make myself normal, it's just sometimes it's so much and I'm so tired, I can't try anymore--_

 

Raven has her hands clamped over her ears, and Charles wants to tell her it won't help, it doesn't ever help. 'Erik,' she says mournfully, like it's the worst thing she's ever heard. 'Erik, he's been trying to stop.' _Killing himself in pieces,_ she thinks and Charles flinches when she grabs hold of him, goes still as she crushes him into a hug.

 

She's not entirely wrong.

 

*

 

 

 

He wakes up the next morning with a blindingly awful headache, a crick in his neck, and the side of his face mashed into a throw pillow--and really, even calling it a pillow is generous. It feels like it might be filled with sand. Charles groans, and jams the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, like maybe if he just presses hard enough, his brain will stop trying to extract itself from his skull.

 

And then a calm, even voice observes, 'Headaches must be the kiss of death for telepaths,' from over the arm of the couch, and Charles nearly jumps out of his own skin, hurls himself upright and immediately regrets it. He clutches at his head again, wincing.

 

'Yes,' Erik says conversationally, although his eyes are on his newspaper, not on Charles, 'That does tend to happen after a night like the one you've had.' He smirks in the general direction of the front page. 'How desperately collegiate.'

 

And...Charles is in Erik's hotel room? Raven's hotel room? Someone's hotel room, anyways, and it's a Thursday and he's going to be late and what, what exactly would have possessed him to stay? He's fairly sure Raven had promised to return him to the dorms, fairly sure only because his memory's mostly just stuffed into the corner of the massive, awful ache that is his brain. 

 

'You passed out on the couch,' Erik says by way of explanation, and turns the page. 'I told Raven we should return you, but she didn't want to wake you up.' Another smirk. 'She seemed to think you looked cute.'

 

'I'm sorry,' Charles says, unbidden and automatic. Erik actually looks at him, then, turns those cold eyes on him, though his expression is mild, and maybe a little confused.

 

'What are you apologizing for?'

 

Passing out on their couch, or taking up their time, or maybe just existing, Charles isn't a hundred percent on that. So he doesn't answer, just hunches into himself a little and looks away. God, what time is it? He's missed class by now, must have done, and it's not like he can't afford to, but still.

 

'Answer me.' Charles' gaze skitters over to Erik and there's nothing mild about that expression now. It's clouded, nearly angry, but Charles can't feel it, so he can't tell.

 

'I shouldn't have come here,' he says. 'You were right.'

 

'I never said that. I said you were useless as you are now.'

 

Charles' mouth quirks up into something almost resembling a smile. 'You were right about that, too.'

 

'Oh, for--' Erik doesn't fold the newspaper closed so much as he crushes it, and Charles grimaces. Even that seems too loud, echoed in the throbbing mess of his hangover. 'You're terrified of your own power. You're alone, and you're isolated, and you haven't done yourself any favours, trying to suppress it--you're half mad as it is, you've all but crippled yourself and that--' he punctuates by leaning forward, closer to Charles, who shrinks back, '--is useless to me.'

 

'I hurt people,' Charles protests, and it's weak. It sounds weak, especially in the face of Erik, who seems to be made of steely resolve and not much else.

 

'And you'll keep hurting people, if you don't learn to control it. What you did to Raven, last night--she had nightmares. She hasn't had nightmares since she was a girl, and I know her. I know they weren't hers.'

 

Charles cringes. 'I'm so sorry, I can't--'

 

'You won't.'

 

'What?'

 

'Don't tell me you _can't._ You can.' Erik looks so fierce at that, so furious and Charles wishes abruptly that he wasn't so impenetrable, because maybe then Charles could just, just make him see, make him understand. 'When you're in pain,' Erik continues, 'when you're out of your head and desperate enough, you can control it.'

 

No. No, that's not right at all. He's got it backwards. Charles frowns. 'That's when I can't,' he protests. 

 

'No? Wanting so badly for someone to understand the kind of pain you're in, to the point that you can actually force them to feel it with you...that's not control?'

 

Charles must actually look like he's just been slapped because Erik's mouth sort of twists into a smile and _oh._ 'I never thought of it like that,' he admits.

 

*

 

He's had lectures on genetics. He's read books, countless medical journals, but it's...not really something he'd considered. Not in his case, although he didn't have a name for it, either. An aberration in his brain, perhaps, some sort of abnormality that allows him to do something normal humans can't. An idiot savant, even. Some kind of biological mistake, something gone terribly, terribly wrong.

 

But Erik just looks at him when he suggests it, that narrow, calculating stare like he's trying to read Charles' mind, instead of the other way around. Raven, she just looks crushed. He doesn't need to read her mind to know that-- _how can you believe that_ , she thinks tenderly. _That everything about you is so fundamentally_ wrong?.

 

She doesn't expect an answer. Charles doesn't give her one.

 

'We're mutants,' is all Erik says to him when he finally screws up the courage to ask how they know what he is, how they know he isn't just mad. Because he's thought it often enough, hasn't he, although he knows that can't be it. He can make people cry, for God's sake, he's not making that up, but sometimes...sometimes he wishes that was it. He really does. He wishes this was the sort of thing chloropromazine could take care of.

 

'Mutants,' Charles repeats. ' _Mutants._ That's...that's why I can do _this_.' He gestures vaguely in the direction of his own head. 'So, can you...?'

 

'We're not all telepaths,' Raven says with a flick of her hand and then a thousand flicks of her skin, and there is a naked girl standing before him. A naked blue girl, with ridged skin and cat-bright eyes and her jaw set, defensive, like she's just waiting for him to say the wrong thing. Like she's heard the wrong thing a thousand times before. 

 

She looks inhuman and fierce and _dangerous_ , and she is the most incredible thing he's ever seen. _My God,_ he thinks, and she tilts her head, so he knows she can hear. _Look at you. You're...that's amazing._ He's rewarded with a bright flash of canines, a pleased gleam of golden eyes. Next to her, Erik relaxes and looks slightly less murderous.

 

'She's beautiful,' he snaps, though, and his eyes are like flint, like steel, like broken glass shoved into tender skin as they meet Charles', sharp and painful.

 

'She is,' Charles agrees. _I'm nothing like her,_ he doesn't say.

 

*

 

When Raven shows up to class next, it's in the body of a tall, blondish man that could, at first glance, easily be Erik's younger brother. The nose is the same, anyways, but the cheekbones aren't as sharp, the mouth not as grim. She's a little bulkier, broad-chested and athletic, but the eyes, the sweep of her hair, the way she hooks her thumbs into the pockets of her trousers, they all scream _Erik._ Charles probably wouldn't have recognized her otherwise, honestly, except for the sharp, sweet angles of her smile and the way she kind of _slinks_ towards him and Christ, she should know better than to do that, looking like a man.

 

'What are you doing?' he hisses at her as she--he? does her borrowed skin warrant the pronoun change?--slides into an empty chair next to him. 'Does Erik know you've gone out looking like that?'

 

'Like what?' Raven says and she sounds like him too. She's even wearing a turtleneck. 'Like Andrew Lehnsherr? Sure he does.' She gives him this look, sideways, like she doesn't understand the problem here.

 

And that's the thing, really. She doesn't. Charles has only known them for three weeks, but he's figured that much out. They don't understand the problem with...well, with anything they do. Erik tosses these words around, these pretty, meaningless sentiments like _mutant and proud_ and _you've nothing to be ashamed of, Charles, you're what nature made you_ and God help him, Erik might actually believe it. 

 

He's not wrong, necessarily. Charles can appreciate that. He understands mutation, understands the biological necessity for it. He can see how Raven and Erik, these two exquisite creatures, might be the next step for mankind. They have these _talents_ , these _abilities_ , these beautiful, impossible gifts that could be used in a thousand ways to help people.

 

Three weeks, and they've already helped him. Raven's a little overbearing, and Erik's a little stoic, but neither of them seemed surprised when he'd shown up on their doorstep, the first evening after they'd dropped him off at his dorms. They played chess with him, and asked about his classes--Raven only went for fun, she said--and Erik taught him to swear in German and showed him this trick where he wound paper clips together into this perfect, woven chain, impossible for the finest tools to separate. Raven taught him to pick locks, and sometimes leaned her back against him while she read and Erik cooked dinner for him twice and every time he left their hotel room, his own dorm seemed a little darker, a little dustier, just because they weren't in it.

 

Erik could stop wars if he chose to. Raven could be anything and everything she wanted, a knight in blue scaled armor for all the little girls who dreamed of being astronauts instead of mothers. And Charles, well. Charles can give people nightmares. He can make them fall apart. He can snare them in the sick black tangle of his own mind so they never get out, never escape the crush of his loneliness, his grief, his self-loathing.

 

Raven and Erik have powers. Charles has a curse, at best.

 

At worst, he figures he probably _is_ one.

 

And that... _that_ is the part they can't understand. Because yes, they're amazing, and yes they're too good to believe and yes, Charles is astounded that these two can even _exist_ , much less exist in his pathetic scrap of a life, but they don't understand that there's a line that can't be crossed. There are social structures and norms that people have to follow and Raven and Erik are brilliant, but they're still aberrations. Humanity isn't kind to aberrations. Charles can't bear to see them crushed.

 

'Don't,' he snaps at Raven as she slides down in her seat and stretches out those mile-long legs. How can she not realize? If he ever had any doubt as to her actual gender, as to the question of whether or not a shapeshifter can even have an actual gender, here's proof. Because he hasn't seen her in the skin of a man for more than a minute or two at a time, so there's no way he could have realized it before. She looks like a man, but she moves like a woman, languid, fluid rolls of the hips and arches of the spine. Her lips still purse and quirk in a way that would be charming on her own face, but on the face of Andrew Lehnsherr--they're wrong.  Jarring.  He can’t stop looking at her and he’s going to be sick.

 

'Don't what?' she asks, clearly puzzled. A pink tongue swipes at her lower lip, catlike and that's wrong, too.

 

'You look like a faggot,' he bites off, quiet as he can, and if she looked like Erik before, the resemblance is uncanny now. Her face goes blank and then hard, that mouth presses into something almost like a snarl and, Charles realizes dimly, she must have a lot of experience in watching Erik get angry.

 

'I'm going to leave now,' she says, even in a way her voice never is. Deadly calm. Dangerous calm. 'Before you say anything that can't be taken back.'

 

'Ra--Andrew,' Charles tries. 'Wait, please--' Because if she goes, she might be _gone_ and it's only been three weeks but sometimes she smiles at Charles the way he used to wish Mother could and if she leaves, he's not sure he can bear it. He only wants to help, only wants to make sure that she doesn't ever have to know what it feels like to be laid out on concrete with a taller boy's knee pressed into the hollow of her throat, slowly pressing the life out of her while the boy hisses _you fucking queer, don't you ever even think of looking at me again._

 

She doesn't wait, though. She just stalks out of the room with a final snarl of, 'I didn't realize you were quite _this_ stupid.'

 

And Charles, wide-eyed and trembling a little, could have told her that weeks ago, if only she'd asked.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey so...finally updated yo

Erik finds him. 

 

Somehow, although Charles realizes that he never told either of them where he lives, Erik finds him shoved into the furthest back corner of a crowded bar, braced precariously between the scuffed bartop and his—sixth? seventh?—glass of cheap whiskey. One of the two is keeping him upright, but only barely, and the bartender has been giving him mournful looks all night as she tops him off again and again, so something must show on his face, in the curl of his shoulders. When Erik slides gracefully into the seat next to him and puts a hand on his shoulder, gentle—they’re so _gentle_ with him and it's only because they don't know better, they don't know yet, but they will, they _will—_ Charles leans into it before he remembers not to.

 

The bartender gives him this tiny smile and winks like she finally understands why he's been haunting her bar the last hour, drinking like liver failure is his end goal tonight.

 

Charles is going to be sick. 

 

He manages to clamp down on the roiling nausea long enough to jerk out of Erik's grip.  Erik could hold him easy, if he wanted, but he lets Charles go. Lets him take another long pull of whiskey and does not say a word, though he watches Charles's throat like he's maybe considering opening it.

 

Charles wishes he would.

 

But Erik, painfully polite, waits for Charles to speak and he's well past the point of having a handle on what his mouth is doing because it certainly isn't consulting his brain before speaking, since the first thing he says isn't _I'm sorry_ and it isn't followed by _I'm so sorry I never meant_ and _you don't have to be here, you don't have to do this anymore, I know, I know, I've been expecting this for weeks so please just do whatever it is you came to do and leave._

 

No. What he says instead is, slurred and barely audible over the sounds of his classmates having an entirely normal brand of fun, 'I. I fucked up.'

 

'Yes,' Erik agrees. He doesn't make a move to reach for Charles again but he doesn't throw a punch of anything either, so. Small victories.

 

'I tried to tell you,' he mumbles into his glass. 'I try to tell everyone.' He lets himself meet Erik's eyes for the briefest, impossible second before he looks away, studies the scarred, pitted wood of the bartop through the bottom of his glass.

 

'You,' Erik says, 'have tried exceedingly hard to not tell us anything, actually. What, exactly, are we meant to have known?'

 

And it's such an enormous question. Charles can't explain it—he doesn't have the words for it sober, and he certainly can't manage them now, because it's never anything he's had to say aloud. Never anything he's had to _say_ , really, and it must show on his skin because he didn't have to say anything to the boys who left him bruised and gasping for air behind the maintenance shed in second year or the girl who'd kicked viciously at his shins under the cafeteria table, smiling wide and bright the entire time as Charles bit his lip bloody and tried not to whimper. No one has ever needed an explanation of how wrong he is before. They just knew, simple intuition or something, must have been, and the impossibility of that explanation sits heavy in his throat.

 

He's choking on it.

 

Erik sighs and waves the bartender over. He orders himself something expensive-sounding and Charles carefully does not watch as he takes a sip because Erik drinks like he enjoys the burn in the back of his throat, and he makes this soft, pleased sound that does unfair things to Charles' already-unsteady stomach.

 

'I'm not like you,' Charles says finally. It's an understatement, it's wholly inadequate and it doesn't even begin to touch the myriad of ways in which he is _not like them,_ either of them, because he isn't human, granted, but he isn't superhuman either. And Charles is a scientist, not a poet, so he tries, 'In evolutionary theory,' and stops to chew at the hole he's been worrying into the inside of his bottom lip since Raven stalked out of the classroom and, very likely, out of his wretched life.

 

God, he's known her barely a month. It shouldn't ache like this. He's _used_ to this.

 

'In evolutionary theory...?' Erik prompts. Charles glares at his own pale knuckles, curled tight against his glass like it's anchoring him, keeping him from drifting off.

 

'It's been proposed that human evolution is impossible to observe the way we've been able to observe it in other species.' It's surprisingly steady and out of the corner of his eye, Charles can see Erik tip his head to the side, a tiny motion for him to continue. Charles does.

 

'Humanity is the only species to display altruism,' he says, 'and it—it interrupts the process. It slows the process, you've got lesser members of the species contributing to the gene pool in ways they shouldn't be. Any other species, the aberrations are meant to die off, you know, makes the whole lot stronger except we're a stupid, sentimental bunch.' He laughs, this tiny, bitter thing and drinks again, just to have something to do with his hands while he's pointedly not looking at Erik.

 

Erik is quiet for a long time. Long enough for the bartender to set Charles to work on whiskey number eight, and Charles wouldn't be surprised if he looked over and Erik had left, so. He doesn't look.

 

Finally, 'And just so I'm clear on this round of your self-deprecating bullshit,' Erik says coolly and Charles flinches like he's been struck, 'which aberration are we trying to use to explain away your suicidal fantasies? Your powers, or the fact that you prefer men?'

 

Charles chokes on his drink and whirls around to face Erik, heartbeat thudding wet and deafening in his ears. 'Quiet!' he hisses. 'You can't, you can't just—‘

 

' _You_ can't,' Erik points out. 'I just did, though, didn't I.'

 

'Someone could hear,' Charles protests.

 

'Yes,' Erik agrees. 'Someone could. And?'

 

_They'll hurt me_ , Charles wants to say, _or worse, they'll hurt you_ , except fierce, bristling Erik doesn't look like anyone could even touch him.  Charles wants so desperately for that to be true, but Erik also smiles at him sometimes like he was hurt a long time ago, so it probably isn't. 

 

Then Erik is leaning towards him and he's blessedly quiet when he speaks, but Charles' gaze snags on Erik's sharp, narrowed glare and he can't quite wrench himself away. Erik is loveliest when he's angry and it's the wrong thing to be thinking entirely, but Charles is beyond drunk and it's not like this is something new. Not like he hasn't, in the quiet hours of the night, after checking a dozen times to make sure his door is closed and locked and the deadbolt's pulled, gotten himself off to the vague impression of shark's teeth and the way Erik's shirts pull over the broad swell of his chest and Charles bites down hard on a sob, hopes to any God listening that Erik's placid, closed-off thoughts work both ways and he can't hear Charles, either.

 

'You're too clever for your own good,' he starts and that's not the first time Charles has heard it, but it's the first time there's been no venom to it. 'You have worked so, so hard to justify this—whatever it is that's got you convinced the right thing for you to do for your _species—_ ‘and he spits that word like it's a curse, ‘—is to crawl off quietly and die, just so no one has to look at you anymore. Am I close?' he says unkindly and the way Charles' shoulders hunch has Erik baring those teeth in something that is very decidedly not a smile. 

 

'How,' Charles says and doesn't know how to follow it.

 

'You've worked so hard to convince yourself that your self-loathing is logical,' Erik continues, 'and I can't say I like the theory behind what you're proposing. So let's try this: say Raven has a child. Say that child isn't like her—it’s human. No powers.'  Charles wants to ask if that's possible, wants to ask if Raven does, because she's never said anything but he's also never asked.  "And then let's say the child is born without the use of its legs.'

 

Charles shreds the thick cardboard coaster he's pulled from under his glass with trembling fingers and nods stiffly.

 

'Should she drown it? Abandon it in the woods for the first available predator to take care of? Should she stop herself loving it, because it is vulnerable and needs taking care of? May always need taking care of?’

 

And Charles would never— _could_ never suggest that, could never even think that because Raven has had little enough in her short life to love, and he knows that child would not grow up thinking itself anything less than perfect if she had anything to say about it. 'Of course not,'he says softly, horrified. 'No, I'm not—I’m not suggesting eugenics, Erik, that's monstrous.'

 

'So it—your _theory—_ applies only to you. It doesn't work in the context of the people you love. Can a theory apply to an individual independent of the rest of the species?'

 

'No,' Charles says. 'No, you know very well it can't.'

 

'And so do you,' Erik reminds him.  'That isn't much of a theory, then, is it.'

 

And then, Erik leaves. Pays Charles' tab as well as his own, but he doesn't say anything after that except, 'You know where to find us when you're ready.'

 

And Charles does, evidently, because he isn't ready until another four drinks in. And he isn't sure, doesn't remember quite how he got there, but he wakes up next morning curled up against their door, with Raven-as-Andrew smiling softly down at him as she offers him a hand up and says, sweet as can be, 'Come on, idiot, up you go.'

 

Charles takes her hand before he's even had time to think it over.


End file.
